


Shapeshifters

by dragonofdispair



Series: Shiny [6]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers Generation One
Genre: Angst, Depression, Hacking, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts, Virtual Reality, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-29
Updated: 2016-08-19
Packaged: 2018-07-27 14:31:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7622290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonofdispair/pseuds/dragonofdispair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Soundwave’s hack, the Virtual Reality Treaty is worth less than glass shards on the floor. Prowl knows this has changed the course of the war, but secret motives have always slagged predictive software. He wants an endgame, but can’t calculate it without knowing the enemies’ dreams. He doesn’t have a plan, but he is not without resources.</p><p>Jazz wants an endgame too. Solo dreaming has consequences. Only a brief few weeks of it while the new systems were set up put incredible strain on his entire faction. Jazz knows this; he just doesn’t know how bad it can really get.</p><p>Laserbeak doesn’t realize what she wants, until someone offers it to her.</p><p>Teletraan knows <i>exactly</i> what it wants.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> (ACK! Was supposed to put this up this morning!)
> 
> Beware the squished feelbugs. I had bug-guts all over my keyboard before I was done. For those of you not up-to-date on Riz and my in-jokes: that means ANGST. 
> 
> Story takes place almost entirely inside various virtual reality sims. Sky’s the limit on avatars! The virtual reality concept came originally from prowlxjazz livejournal community anniversary challenge from 2015. Original text for the challenge can be found [here.](http://prowlxjazz.livejournal.com/926239.html) Challenge is closed, but that doesn’t stop me from writing more and more VR stuff anyway.
> 
> Beta'd by 12drakon, Rizobact and other members of the writing group.
> 
> TRIGGER WARNINGS for depression and suicidal thoughts.

_Careful calculations_  
_Details drawn down to design_  
— Garth Brooks, _“Man against Machine”_

_._

_._

_._

The new, higher security VR systems did have two major drawbacks. Well, three. _Four_ , maybe… but after his experience with Laserbeak, Jazz didn’t consider a base-coding level ban on functional weapons that could shoot a mech’s avatar or a ban on coding that immobilized their avatars to be a drawback. Without Teletraan, the Autobots still relied on lesser AIs to control the environments, limiting the size, scope, and details. Each new environment had to be pre-programmed from scratch, though Wheeljack _had_ created a sort of specialized “building mode” filled with blank space, and access to a selection of basic materials that mechs without any programming ability of their own could use to make their own sims. Minecraft, the Autobot edition. Still… No more changeable environments that responded to a mech’s desires and perceptions before he even knew what they were. Manual — or voice — controls only. No more wandering as far as the horizon and beyond. All sims now had walls. Limits were the new normal.

And in keeping with that theme, one of those new limits was that each environment couldn’t have more than two participants at a time. That was a security feature. No Decepticon infiltrators allowed, and no dumping all the Autobots into the same sim to be infected by the same coding all at once. Hopefully, it was a temporary measure, but for now… Quarantine. It sucked major slag for Blaster and his cohort, and for the Aerialbots and other gestalt teams. But it seemed two was the limit before some security had to be compromised. The Autobots adapted, and the connections between mechs became an ever changing web of actual effort being used to maintain the friendship, camaraderie, and trust. Effort to keep themselves from being too cliquish and withdrawn from each other. Actual, honest-to-Primus _schedules_ were being drawn up. Drawn up and violated at the drop of the virtual hat, of course, but the Autobots slowly rebuilt the web of trust and play they’d once had with standard VR.

Except Prowl.

Before Soundwave’s hack, Prowl had actually spent the _least_ amount of time in privacy mode of any Autobot. He’d preferred public sims… He just hung out on the periphery. Zecora in her hut, only rarely coming into Ponyville for supplies. He’d watched and basked in seeing all the Autobots safe and well. There, but unseen. With only two mechs per sim, being the unseen participant wasn’t an option anymore. And because everyone _thought_ he had spent all his time in privacy mode, he wasn’t getting the invites to join in any reindeer games.

It was why Jazz made a point of inviting himself over to Prowl’s little corner of the VR systems as often as possible.

Tonight he pinged for entry into Prowl’s dream as he initiated recharge, wondering what Prowl was dreaming this time.

Jazz hoped it wasn’t just a sim of his office. Prowl had always had his hacks that allowed him to work in the public sim, where he balanced the dual role of pony crafting potions and workaholic SIC. With no true public sim, he’d begun just defaulting to his own standard mech-form avatar, in his own office, doing nothing but his own work. Wasn’t healthy.

Well, if that were the case, Jazz had the coding for a duplicating glitch and a sparkly marker on standby to distract the mech with, and he wasn’t afraid to use them! Time to defile Prowl’s desk!

Except maybe not tonight.

Instead of walking into a recreation of anything real, he was faced with a selection screen: his own form, standing on nothing, with nothing nearby except some glowing text floating in the void.

[Hello (Jazz)]  
[(Prowl) is currently engaged in a private game of (Battletech). Privacy mode has been engaged.]  
[(Prowl) has selectively disengaged privacy settings to allow (Jazz) to participate.]  
[There is room for (1) more user to join this simulation.]  
[Would you like to join this simulation? Y/N?]

Well... color Jazz surprised. Not work, but also not Prowl’s usual play. Prowl, when he wasn’t working, and had the freedom to choose his own sim and its parameters, favored four-legged critters over human avatars. And he never engaged privacy mode, selectively or otherwise, even when he was doing work he really didn’t want interrupted.

Curious Jazz was curious. At least it wasn’t a cat sim again. Mech really liked Tad Williams’ _Tailchaser_ and the _Warrior Cats_ sims way too much for someone who’d never be caught dead reading a fantasy novel, and definitely enjoyed the more serious of the cat-POV genre like _I Am A Cat_. Or else the curiosity would likely kill the Jazz. Again.

He reached out and clicked “Y”.

[Setting-appropriate avatars are required for this simulation.]  
[Avatar requirements, as set by (Prowl), are as follows:]  
[Human.]  
[Mechwarrior.]  
[Factional allegiance to one of the following in-universe factions: Clan Ghost Bear, Clan Nova Cat, Clan Smoke Jaguar, Clan Snow Raven.]

Jazz loaded up one of his favorite human avatars, added in the Mechwarrior data package, and employed a randomizer to choose a faction. In most sims, Lucrezia’s alley cat build gave her a waifish look, but dressed in a Clan Mechwarrior’s uniform, she looked downright dangerous. Brown eyes and black hair were often commented on by other Autobots as being too _normal_ for Jazz, but she liked them _because_ they were so common among humans. The faction selection automatically changed the avatar’s surname, and saved this new version of the avatar as separate file from the avatar’s main version. The data loaded into his processor, and she thought she knew Prowl’s game plan for the night. All four factions employed strict rules of warfare and rarely violated them - according to Prowl’s version, at least; Jazz knew enough of the universe to know that things were much more fluid according the game’s actual canon.

Soundwave had blasted apart treaties and dreams alike. He’d violated the last true rule of civil warfare of Cybertronian kind. Prowl’s personal nightmare, which wouldn’t disappear when he disengaged from VR. Fantasy was the order of the night. Warfare according to the rules.

[(Jazz/Lucrezia Mckenna of Clan Snow Raven has been designated an ally of (Prowl).]

Jazz had about half a second to register that the barely adequate AI hadn’t told her who _Prowl_ was before she materialized in the sim.

In chains.

For a moment, she panicked. She cursed the primitive AI — Teletraan would’ve given her a set of lockpicks! — and struggled. The guards grabbed her and forcibly hauled her along the corridor.

Something was off with the gravity, Jazz absently noticed. It was lighter than it should have been.

She didn’t dwell on it. She snarled and kicked out, sending one of the goons tumbling. The other guards tackled her.

A quartet of thugs versus Jazz… It should have been a no-brainer. About the time Jazz was flat on the ground, ankles shackled and otherwise trussed up like a turkey, she identified the uniforms. Otomo — Draconis Combine, special ops and personal bodyguards to that faction’s leader.

Great. _Perfect._ Exactly what sort of game was Prowl playing tonight?

She was about to find out. The guards literally carried her into the ship’s — now that she was concentrating, she could hear the powerful engines and feel the _lurch_ that meant that lessened gravity was artificially created by centrifugal motion — the ship’s command center. Its war room.

The Coordinator, Theodore Kurita himself, looked up from the map he and his generals were clustered around. The Otomo snapped to attention, dropping the trussed-up Jazz in the process; Jazz tried to flail for balance, but only ended up hitting the deck plating harder.

She looked up into Theodore’s eyes as he stepped closer to look down at her.

“Heya Prowler.” She grinned. “Feeling kinky tonight? I kinda like it.” She wiggled suggestively in her bindings.

The Coordinator rolled his eyes.

“Unbind all but her hands,” he commanded the Otomo in perfect Japanese. “Then clear the room.”

“With all due respect, Kurita-sama—”

Prowl didn’t let the general finish. He turned and glared at the man. Jazz didn’t need to see it to imagine the way the Coordinator’s eyes went flat and hostile; he had seen that glare often enough on Prowl’s own faceplates. Simplified AI-run NPC or not, the general gulped and fell silent.

“Clear the room,” Prowl repeated softly, and this time the generals and bodyguards scurried out silently.

Hands still cuffed, but otherwise free, Jazz rolled gracefully to her feet. She idly looked around the War Room, and wondered if this sim actually had any of the rest of the ship, or if Prowl had only built this one room and the hallway she’d materialized in. It wasn’t the Minecraft-block texture of Wheeljack’s sim-builder though — Prowl had always had a deft hand at modifying his own VR sims (and hacking them), if not the creativity that made Sunstreaker the true artist at it.

Jazz flopped her cuffed hands at Prowl and waggled her eyebrows suggestively. Prowl raised one of his own. “Not yet.”

Jazz gave a dramatic sigh. “I’m having a bit of a hard time figuring out your game here, mech.”

“Games…” Prowl mused in response. “You’ve told me about your symbol dreams, where you would allow the responsiveness of the VR just lead you from symbol to symbol until a nagging unconscious thought became conscious. ‘Interesting dreams’ you called them, ‘full of random thoughts trying to find the metaphor of the spark’. Do you remember what I said in response?”

“You couldn’t do it. Your tac-comp hijacked the attempt and ran combat sims all night. No answers.”

“Right,” the Coordinator paced back toward the map, and Jazz followed, “I’ve found that the duplicating glitch — a glitch no longer, since we are using it deliberately and intentionally — has opened up a new avenue to explore such things. Nothing so random,” he assured, “as following my own thoughts from metaphor to metaphor until I have found what I did not know I sought.”

Jazz put her cuffed hands on the map and leaned in to examine the holographic battle. Unlike a real battle, or even a true VR one, this one had Battletech’s hex-grid, each one neatly labeled with a number, as well as the information of what sort of terrain was on it. This wasn’t the holographic representation of a fictional battle within Prowl’s _Coordinator of the Draconis Combine_ fantasy, but the holographic represented of someone playing a Battletech _game._ VR allowed for some really weird slag, but sometimes Prowl’s mind was just…

“Can’t do that sort of dream in these high-security VR sims anyway,” Jazz said, instead of commenting on the weirdness of playing a Battletech game _within_ a Battletech sim.

“Of course.” Prowl paced around the holo-table, examining the game with shrewd eyes. Deftly he made a move, and the AI controlling the game made one in response.

Battletech was a complex game, and with a combined-arms battalion on the board, it approached the complexity of a true tactical simulation rather than just a playful puzzle. It boggled Jazz’s mind a bit to review all the rules for various kinds of units, everything from horse-mounted infantry to starships, and how each was affected by terrain, environmental conditions, heat, and damage. Prowl’s initial battle plans for real battles didn’t have so many if-thens.

“But,” Prowl continued while Jazz poked the units to bring up their information sheets and tried in vain to figure out who was winning, “while you’ve been thinking these last weeks of spider webs, wishing you could dream of them, I have been thinking of games. Last night, I took it upon myself to play as many of them at the same time as my tac-suite would allow me to.”

“Hence the duplicating glitch.”

“Exactly. And what I found, Jazz, is that humans have created a near-infinite number of games. Some required more of my tactical computer’s processing power than others,” he waved his hand over the map and the Battletech hex-grid shrank to sit side by side with a stark black and white chessboard. Prowl must have made some command Jazz couldn’t see, because both games continued, recordings rather than live-games. Then both shrank to be joined by the screen-views of a technicolor Starcraft game with its hundreds of tiny units scrambling across the screen and the stark simplicity of Klondike solitaire, then again to make room Mario Kart in all its wacky cartoon glory and Monopoly’s industrial chic.

It was starting to make Jazz a bit dizzy. “Some of these got more rules than others.”

“More rules did not always lead to more complex play,” Prowl corrected. “Often yes, but it was the complexity of gameplay that most effectively occupied the tactical computer, not the number of rules.”

The recorded games shrank again, and three more games appeared on the map. Jazz had to lean in close to see them. Civilization’s simplified map. Xia: Legends of a Drift System’s detailed little ships flying through a tiled map of a solar system. Firefly: The Board Game and its dozens of piles of cards depicting portraits and weapons and everything else a captain needed to run a ship.

“I _truly_ began having issues with my ability to continue adding new processing threads when I began playing games with multiple win conditions.”

“Huh?”

Theodore’s voice was one that was very good for chuckling. It always amazed Jazz how Prowl could throw himself into the persona of a non-mech avatar and actually _be_ that different person, complete with mannerisms that Prowl would never engage in IRL, when he had such trouble even connecting with his avatar’s body when he was in a sim as himself. “Honestly Jazz, you already know this, even if you don’t realize you know it. You play Dungeons and Dragons with Ironhide and Mirage, yes?”

“Did, yeah,” Jazz confirmed, “Ain’t as much fun with only two people, and the new master AIs aren’t smart enough to come up with good stories.”

“So what’s the win condition for that game? How do you count victory?”

“We don’t die,” Jazz mused, and saw a game of Zombies!!! add itself to the map, the little game pieces surrounded by hordes of greenish-grey undead pieces, “and we beat the monsters.” A game of Dungeon Roll appeared, the treasure chest shaped box in the middle and the dice strewn around it. “And we collect loot.” A game Jazz didn’t recognize, but which seemed to involve collecting outfit pieces — clear cards with the clothing printed on them so that the players’ characters could be seen wearing their new accessories — appeared.

“And when you’ve accomplished all that?” Prowl prompted.

“We sell it off, gear back up, and go out to do it all again. D&D is a story…” Jazz grinned as she watched a game of Gloom appear in the last empty space. “‘Cause you don’t win a game of Dungeons and Dragons. You ‘win’ and the game ends, which just means you’ve lost. So multiple win conditions — games that have different ways to win.” She tapped the game of Zombies!!! “Like this one: can win by being the last player standing, or by escaping the board first.”

“And the win condition a player has chosen determines their style of play,” Prowl leaned in close to the board. “Their tactics change, based on no variable that the tactical computer can determine. Only once play has begun and I have committed to my own chosen win condition is it possible to gather enough data to counter my opponents’ tactics. It was frustrating.”

“Specially once you pull chance into it,” Jazz said. “Bet the AI opponents changed their tactics a lot based on random factors. Even changed which win condition they were after?”

“Correct. Further, human games occasionally have yet another layer of difficulty: _secret_ win conditions.” Four more games appeared: Diplomacy, Battlestar Galactica The Board Game, and two more Jazz didn’t recognize. “Win conditions that are only valid to one player, and unknown to the others. These,” Prowl tapped the first games, Chess and Battletech, to bring Jazz’s attention to them. Jazz didn’t see why for a moment.

Then she did. Both games had paused.

That made her go back and reexamine all the games on the map, tiny as they’d become. All of them had slowed, stuttered or stopped in some way, while Prowl’s tactical computer struggled with too many unknown variables informing tactics.

“This is what the tactical computer had difficulty with,” Prowl finished quietly, somewhat unnecessarily.

“Right. Motive kinda slags up predictive software.”

Here Prowl laughed. “Indeed, Jazz. So simple… and yet an entire war, hundreds of different motives, all of them shifting like the tides, and I had never quite managed to figure out why my tactical computer couldn’t calculate an end. Motive.” He swept away all the games and replaced them by a true tactical simulation. “What is our win condition? What is the Decepticons’? What about Optimus’? Megatron’s?... Because that is what my searching-dream revealed to me: Optimus’ secret win condition is not the same as mine. Megatron’s is not the same as Soundwave’s. All of us are playing with motives independent of the win conditions for our factions.”

“We’re people, not pieces, Prowl.” She didn’t believe Prowl really was trying to reduce them all to mere game pieces; she had seen him in grief too often, hiding so deep in the Everfree forest that it lost its cartoon trees, to be replaced by the much more realistic ones he conjured from his memory. But they were all still recovering from recharge deprivation, the insanity and infighting brought on by solo dreaming. That illness could still be lingering in Prowl’s processor, which was trying protect itself by reducing casualties to numbers.

Theodore’s eyes were serious. “I’m aware. And this isn’t about grief or guilt, or shielding myself from it. We, all of us, even the Decepticons, are people.” He smirked. “In fact, that was rather the point: _pieces_ can be predicted, because they move only according to the rules of the game, but _people_ with all their complex, changing motives, cannot be. Making that part of the game — implementing the rules to include _different motives for each player_ — was the threshold of complexity beyond which I had no true advantage as a player.”

Jazz toyed with the cuffs around her wrist. “But you already know motive slags predictive software. Can’t predict what you got no data on. That’s what these dreams are: looking for an answer you didn’t know you knew… So what does knowing you know it change for you?”

“I can’t assume I know everyone’s motives. Soundwave committed an atrocity that very easily could have won the war, literally overnight, and yet he let us live. He called it mercy, but his ‘mercy’ has left us floundering for any sort of safety amid sleep deprivation and nightmares. Left us groping for the solidarity that is our strength… and yet, no attacks took advantage, while we recovered? Forget what he said to you, Jazz. Forget what he told you. A player will always lie about his secret motive. Concentrate on _how_ he’s played: what’s his motive?”

Jazz wasn’t so sure she _could_ divorce what she was thinking from what Soundwave had told her. Guilt over Laserbeak, torture for nothing more than to prove she _would_ … necessary as she’d judged it then, it was still a new low. Soundwave had every right to seek vengeance for that… but… “It wasn’t about us — me. Wasn’t revenge,” she finally said slowly. “Laserbeak being the one to shoot us into overload, making me watch — that was revenge. But the hack itself? Soundwave was going to do that anyway — he said as much — and if he didn’t do it to win the war in one swoop, then his motive wasn’t winning. Wasn’t a distraction for another attack. Didn’t even cripple us for too long. We were the means, not the end. His motive ain’t got nothing to do with us.”

“So what _is_ written on Soundwave’s secret motive card?” Prowl looked down at the simulation, running its battle over and over, every minute producing a different outcome as chance and changing motives turned what should have been a simple exercise into a quagmire of what-ifs. “I can’t win a game like this without much more data. I need to see all the secret motive cards,” Theodore’s eyes glittered as he gazed across the table at Jazz. “Autobots don’t dream of electric sheep; why should I assume anything about Decepticon dreams? I need to _know,_ Jazz.”

Jazz’s breath caught in her chest. “Prime won’t approve.”

“Prime wants a clean war. He wants us to be better than our enemies. I agree with that much of it. We should not allow ourselves to meet atrocity with atrocity, but that is not a motive card that leads to an ending, only a continuation.”

“And your motive card? Come on Prowl, what’s it say?”

“I want an end,” Prowl said quietly. “I don’t want to play war like Dungeons and Dragons. I want the day to come where I would only need to strain my tactical computer for the pleasures of playing as many games as I can at once. I want to do it without becoming a monster, but I do not hold myself to as high a standard as Optimus does. And you, Jazz? What’s your secret win condition?”

What did Jazz want? Because that was what Prowl was really asking. What Jazz wanted and how far she was willing to go to achieve it.

What was Prowl’s game here? Jazz looked at the war room of a Draconis Combine ship, at the leader of the Draconis Combine, then down at her own attire. Clan Snow Raven mechwarrior, handcuffed like a prisoner. Enemy prisoner of war.

Except that, according to the faction information she’d downloaded when she’d entered Prowl’s sim, the Clans didn’t do traditional prisoners of war. When captured they served. War according to the rules. Prowl was changing his rules, but he’d follow them… and when she looked at her own secret motive card, she found it was eerily similar to Prowl’s.

She held out his wrists.

Prowl came around the table to lightly hold one of Jazz’s hands in his own. “Say it, Jazz.”

“You and me,” Jazz drawled casually, though her eyes remained locked on Prowl’s, “seems we got dealt a couple of duplicate cards. In that vein… On my honor, I accept your bondcord.”

Because that was the game Prowl was playing right now. The factions collectively known as The Clans (of which Snow Raven was one) had an interesting practice in regards to prisoners of war. Captured warriors were given the choice of serving their captors, faithfully and honorably, and were eventually adopted into their new Clan. Or, if they felt they could not do that, they were given the choice to die, honorably, right then. The Draconis Combine didn’t have that tradition, but once they figured out this was a thing with Clan warriors, they used it to gain the services of skilled fighters and pilots who had once been enemies. Because Clan warriors would serve honorably and honestly once they’d taken a bondcord. Swearing fealty, with overtones of adoption. Kind of a heady thing Prowl was asking of her.

A smile, surprisingly gentle for all that it showed his teeth. “I knew you’d figure out the game.” He didn’t give Jazz a chance to respond and bent over her hands to tie a braided cord around one wrist. When he drew away, he took the handcuffs with him.

The cord weighed practically nothing, and the lighter gravity took away what little weight it did have. Further, it was only a collection of code that would disappear as soon as the sim ended.

It was a symbol. A metaphor. Promise and allegiance. Trust.

Might as well have weighed as much as a metrotitan.

“So what’s next?” she asked.

“I don’t yet have a plan,” Prowl said. “I need data… but that is for tomorrow. Tonight… This sim has served its purpose. I was planning on playing Warrior Cats again after. You can stay, or go play with another Autobot, if you want.”

“Fur, fangs, and fun adventures?” Jazz drawled. “Sign me up!” She  _loved_ playing cats with Prowl. Even if curiosity had a tendency to kill him for sorta-real.

Prowl nodded. “Jarvis, please cancel current simulation and transfer both players to ThunderClan. Use Milkfrost as my own avatar, and Nettlestep for Jazz.”

“Really?” Jazz managed to say incredulously as the sim pixelated and changed around them, “You named your control AI ‘Jarvis’?”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ugh! I'd say I'll never do colored text again... but there are two more chapters to this story and a sequel that's in the works. ::headdesk:: I _really_ hate coding.

Step one was access. Jazz didn’t have a legion of spark-bonded cassettes to send on his errands. If he wanted to invade the Decepticon VR, he had to find a way to do it himself. 

The Decepticons had been too quiet, he argued, and now the other officers were in a stable enough mental state to see it too. Prowl laid out the plan to go retrieve some data and get a first-hand view of what was going on under the sea. Prime approved on the condition that Jazz be careful, and Jazz went tiptoeing into enemy territory like he had a thousand times before. Joke was he practically lived in the  _ Nemesis’ _ ventilation system. 

Great, awesome. Jazz took the time to do the mission as-stated, do it right, and come back with data Prime could use. Plans for a new super weapon of the month? Snatched right off Starscream’s desk without so much as a peep from the security system. 

Getting access to the Decepticons’ VR systems was harder. Soundwave was guarding those. 

Jazz’s little signal router would’ve done better if it had been placed closer to the bridge, where the main computer sat, but he finally had to settle for just clipping it to an extra recharge berth in a set of empty quarters. The room was partially flooded, and barnacles grew over three quarters of the walls, but the berth’s electronics and data connections were still intact. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a signal. It was access.

With no one the wiser about  _ Jazz _ now shredding the Treaty into tinier pieces, he activated his floats and hailed Seaspray to come pick him up.

Piece of cake.

.

.

[Hello (Jazz).]  
[There is room for (1) more user to join this simulation.]  
[Would you like to join this simulation? Y/N?]

“Heya Jarvis. What’s Prowl up to tonight?”

[(Prowl) is engaged in a live action version of (The Skull and Shackles campaign path for Pathfinder).]

“Swords, sorcery, and swashbuckling on the high seas? Sign me up!” Jazz, loaded up a level appropriate version of his Merisiel — elven rogues for the win! — avatar and clicked “Y”.

.

.

Teletraan wasn’t a mech, wasn’t alive. No spark. That didn’t mean it didn’t have motive. It didn’t get lonely, but had been built to provide and protect Autobot dreams. It knew it had failed at that duty, and that was the reason it had had no dreamers to protect recently. It wanted its dreamers back, but knew it would not get them until everything was once again safe in public sims. 

Prowl was right. Knowing the motive made things a lot easier.

Teletraan was more than happy to divert all the processing power it would have once used to maintain the Autobot VR dreams to Jazz and Prowl’s efforts. Jazz didn’t dare connect to VR just yet at this stage, but together he and Teletraan slowly worked on step two: gaining enough control over the Decepticons’ code to do what he and Prowl planned to do. They built bridges made of code and firewalled them in multiple layers of security, illusions and thorns made of code. Jazz was a good hacker, he had a knack for breaking firewalls, for finding a chink in a system’s defenses and squirming his way inside, but alone couldn’t match Soundwave’s skill. He’d break, and Soundwave would build, he’d build and Soundwave would break… except Teletraan.

Hacking was like building sandcastles, one grain of sand at a time, with chopsticks, in pitch blackness. Technically, Teletraan had no  _ skill _ at hacking. It copied Jazz’s efforts, followed his lead, and lent all its idle processing power to Jazz’s computations. It watched for any hint that Soundwave had discovered their intrusion when Jazz couldn’t, and noted any changes that happened while Jazz was gone, for him to review before they started again. 

Teletraan’s help meant that Jazz could take on this task at the slow, methodical pace Prowl insisted they do so to remain undetected. If Jazz had been doing this on his own, he would have been forced to blitz it. Hack in as fast as possible, attack the Decepticon VR, and then retreat before Soundwave could respond. Not the best situation for intelligence gathering, which is what Prowl wanted. Prowl didn’t want to destroy the Decepticon dreams — he wanted to  _ know _ them, and that meant taking things slow and remaining undetected. So, thank Primus for Teletraan’s help.

.

.

[Hello (Jazz).]  
[There is room for (1) more user to join this simulation.]  
[Would you like to join this simulation? Y/N?]

“Y”

It was believed, among those who knew about the duplication glitch, that Prowl was the only one who could utilize it. Processors that could take in all the extra data generated by a second avatar (much less a third or fourth or… it seemed Prowl’s upper limit was twenty-six, as long as he wasn’t doing anything too strenuous) and still maintain control of the avatar weren’t something every mech had.

Prowl disagreed.

“The first duplicate avatar actually takes very little processing power,” Prowl said as they stood in a hall of mirrors. Jazz wasn’t sure which of Prowl’s reflections were duplicate avatars and which were only reflections. Jazz himself had neither. It was kinda creepy, like he’d turned into a vampire sometime while he wasn’t looking. “You connect to other computer systems to work with them and remain in control of your own body regularly, so you should be able to maintain at least two.”

Jazz poked the blank mirror in front of him. “So if it ain’t processing power, what’s the secret?”

“The ability to perceive both sets of data, as both  _ self _ and  _ other _ , and maintain separate thought-threads for each.”

A chill crawled up Jazz’s spinal struts. That sounded like a good description of his doublethink partitions. “Hey… I just finished fixing m’mind. I ain’t gonna start firewalling pieces of m’self off again.” Then to cover how uneasy the idea made him, “Ratchet’d kill me,” he joked.

“Who said anything about firewalls,” one of Prowl’s reflections retorted, as he paced over to look at Jazz (and Prowl) standing in the center of the hall. “You’re not trying to create a separate you that feels and thinks differently. Not trying to lock away parts of yourself — quite the opposite. You are bringing more of yourself into play. You are creating two thought-threads so that they can act separately.”

“So the doublethink, without the firewalls?”

“Don’t look at it as ‘doublethink’,” another reflection said; Jazz didn’t see which one at first, but then caught sight of Prowl pacing agitatedly around them. “Think of it as a character. A persona. An avatar even. When you play at being Vinyl Scratch, allow a part of you to become her, while part of you remains Jazz. Here you stand, as you, and there,” the reflection hit a joint between the mirrors, one mirror reflecting the other; the reflection split into two, who both continued to speak, “is also you. A you who will only remain different as long as that character does.”

Jazz looked back to where his own reflection  _ should _ have been. He reached out and touched the smooth glass and closed his optics under his visor.

_ I’m here, _ he thought.  _ I’m here, but I’m also there in the mirror. _

_ No… as long as I’m thinking about “here” vs. “there”, it won’t work. _

_ I’m  _ **_here_ ** _ but I’m also...  _ **_here._ **

He didn’t feel anything change. He stood on solid ground and touched a solid mirror, but when he opened his optics he looked into his own reflection.

“Gah!” yelled part of himself who hadn’t thought it would actually work, flailing and falling to the ground. He looked up at himself, who smirked confidently.  _ He’d _ had no doubts.

It only lasted a moment, before Jazz and Jazz could no longer see themselves as separate and one of them faded, but he jumped up and down in victory and launched himself into a hug at the nearest Prowl.

This one was one who felt extremely fond of his friend and sometimes-lover, so he hugged back.

.

.

[Hello (Jazz).]  
[There is room for (1) more user to join this simulation.]  
[Would you like to join this simulation? Y/N?]

.

.

With his newfound mastery of the duplication glitch, Jazz (literally) split his time between dreaming with the other Autobots here at the  _ Ark _ , and scurrying across the bridges and through the firewalls he and Teletraan had built, silently invading the Decepticons’ dreams.

While part of him was five year old Jennifer Drake and running around with Bluestreak’s newest version of Pinkie Pie in a Minecraft-esque McDonald’s play yard (complete with bouncing house), the other became a tiny cockroach and scurried into the hostile halls of the  _ Nemesis’ _ master AI and the virtual reality it maintained.

There were traps galore, set by Soundwave. The mech knew what he’d done would not go without retaliation of some sort. He was prepared. 

Cockroaches, though, were pretty much unkillable.

.

.

[Hello (Jazz).]  
[(Prowl) is currently engaged in a private simulation. Privacy mode has been engaged.]  
[(Prowl) has selectively disengaged privacy settings to allow (Jazz) to participate.]  
[There is room for (1) more user to join this simulation.]  
[Would you like to join this simulation? Y/N?]

Jazz stared at the text for a long moment. Last time he had been confronted with those words on Prowl’s selection screen it had been an invitation for Jazz to discuss something Prowl had believed too sensitive a topic, too private a simulation, to risk others stumbling upon it in a fit of curiosity.

Now though… “Jarvis m’man, what sim’s Prowl got running?”

[(Prowl) has engaged (Wheeljack’s Environment Builder).]

Right. Okay. Designing a new thing. Maybe he just didn’t want to be disturbed while he was working on making a new sim.

Jazz still looked at those words “Privacy mode” for a long time before he managed to settle his processor enough to select “N”. No need to disturb Prowl’s fit of creativity. He pinged Ironhide’s VR to see if he was available to do something fun tonight. According to the schedule, Ironhide was supposed to be with Sideswipe, but the twins were the worst offenders about keeping to that schedule, and a little bird had told him during shift-change that Sideswipe was planning a surprise for Bluestreak. Ironhide should be free.

.

.

The  _ Nemesis’ _ public VR wasn’t anything like the Autobots’. It was as cold and dank as the crashed ship itself. Water didn’t drip from the cracks, but it was the same miserable and depressing experience as sneaking through the real  _ Nemesis _ .

The  _ entirety _ of the Decepticons’ public sim was just this endless corridor, lined by locked doors on either side. Jazz the cockroach had learned to navigate this hallway very well, but he had yet to get beyond the doors. 

Metaphors. Symbols. Behind each of those was a Decepticon, engaged in his own privacy-mode fantasy. He knew the shape of the metaphor well.

Tonight the goal was to get behind a door.

For this, Jazz had abandoned the cockroach avatar for something even smaller, less noticeable, and harder to kill. Jazz-the-flea was prepared to wait all night.

He’d timed his entry into the Decepticons’ VR to shift-change. Not an hour went by before the off-shift Decepticons started plugging into their recharge berths and began materializing in the sim. Jazz watched them. They bristled and growled like junkyard dogs as they sorted themselves and entered their own private dreams, locking the doors behind them. 

Finally one materialized close enough for Jazz to jump — he was still a flea, and fleas were not built for chasing down far-away prey — and cling to a mech’s plating. He heard the argument his ride was having as large reverberations through the mech’s plating, rising and falling with the cadence of angry yelling, but he couldn’t understand the words.

Finally the mech turned and the flea’s sensitive hairs detected the change in air pressure and moisture as he was swept into someone’s dream.

_ Do Decepticons dream of electric sheep? _

.

.

[Hello (Jazz).]  
[There is room for (1) more user to join this simulation.]  
[Would you like to join this simulation? Y/N?]

Jazz shook his head. Obviously he was worrying over nothing. Prowl just hadn’t wanted to be bothered for a night. 

Flea-Jazz was getting better at picking his spots and hitching rides past the privacy mode doors in the Decepticon VR. Fleas couldn’t shudder, but the mind within wished they could. Decepticon dreams were seriously messed up.

.

.

[Hello (Jazz).]  
[(Prowl) is currently engaged in a private simulation. Privacy mode has been engaged.]  
[(Prowl) has selectively disengaged privacy settings to allow (Jazz) to participate.]  
[There is room for (1) more user to join this simulation.]  
[Would you like to join this simulation? Y/N?]

_ This, _ Jazz thought, the sixth night he’d seen that message in a row,  _ is definitely starting to be a problem. _

“What’s Prowl up to tonight, Jarvis?” Maybe Prowl was doing something he really did want to keep private…

[(Prowl) has engaged (Chess Tournament in the Park)]

Jazz frowned. That was Prowl’s office sim. Jazz hadn’t thought it possible, but he’d been seeing  _ more _ of that sim than before, as Prowl insisted that his VR sim was the only place they could discuss what Jazz was finding in the  _ Nemesis’ _ VR. The filename had been carefully selected to put off inquiring medics and discourage curious, mischievous frontliners. In the days of the shared AI, Prowl had never enforced that name with privacy mode. Prowl didn’t  _ like _ privacy mode.

And yet, these days Jazz was coming to Prowl’s selection screen to find that he was the only one  _ allowed _ to enter Prowl’s dreams.

It wasn’t affecting his waking behavior yet, but it was obvious to Jazz that something was changing for Prowl. That closed-off perception people had of him was starting to become truth. He was starting to obsess.

Constant solo dreaming wasn’t good. Wasn’t healthy. Only a few weeks of it had gnawed at the cracks in the ranks of the Autobots, and Jazz was seeing how centuries of mistrust and locked-up dreams had been affecting the Decepticons. Paranoia. Mistrust. Obsession… Constant privacy mode, the same dream over and over. Jazz’s thoughts resisted the idea that  _ Prowl _ had anything in common with the ‘Cons, but there was starting to be a certain similarity there. Jazz shuddered. No. It wasn’t happening to Prowl. It  _ couldn’t _ be happening to Prowl. 

It was still a problem though. 

Jazz-the-flea was already waiting outside what he thought was probably Megatron’s locked dream-door, waiting for the warlord to walk by so he could get a glimpse of the crazy tyrant’s VR sim, and Jazz-here needed to distract Prowl.

It was harder without the mirror — symbols and metaphors — but Jazz managed to have another copy of himself step to the side to stand side-by-side. New-Jazz immediately pinged Optimus’ VR, hoping  _ he _ was sticking to the schedule and was alone tonight.

While New-Jazz waited for a response, Other-Jazz asked, “Jarvis? Could I have m’art kit?”

Immediately the case of markers, pens, and crayons manifested in his hand. Jazz was no artist, not like Sunstreaker, but this wasn’t for drawing on canvas.

“Good luck distracting Prowl,” New-Jazz said. He shared Other-Jazz’s concerns.

“Good luck with Prime,” Other-Jazz wished his duplicate. He knew how stubborn Prime could be. Fortunately he’d given New-Jazz a good dose of stubborn too. 

Armed with all the scents and colors and textures and other sensations he’d carefully collected for maximum distraction potential, Other-Jazz clicked “Y” right as New-Jazz went to Optimus’ selection screen, and both of them dissolved into pixels, swept away to their different destinations.

.

.

“If Prowl wants privacy, we should let him have it, Jazz,” 

It was the fourth time Prime had said that in fourteen minutes — which was a very Prowl-like thought, and Jazz didn’t like having it because of  _ why _ he was thinking enough about Prowl to be channeling his habits. He and Prime were in human avatars, dressed in brightly colored shirts and shorts and no shoes. The sim had the distinctive blockiness of one created in Wheeljack’s version of Autobot Minecraft. The water sparkled with texture and  _ almost _ covered the seams between blocks. The boat was even less realistic, merely a brown platform with sides and seats made from a wood-like texture. The boat didn’t move. Optimus had made the water texture stretch far enough to swim for a short distance, then enclosed the sim in a wall made of a spectacular sunset as seen from Hawaii.

He’d gotten the fish programmed by Wheeljack, so at least they looked and behaved realistically. Since this sim was all about taking a fishing pole and quietly sitting in the boat trying to catch them, that meant they were elusive and required patience.

It was quiet, relaxing… and Jazz didn’t currently have that patience. “It ain’t that he don’t  _ want _ company, Prime. If he didn’t want company, he wouldn’t have any exceptions.”

“So what do you think is the issue?” Prime’s avatar did a perfect overhand cast, sending the baited hook flying into the water. “There shouldn’t be any significant difference between what he did before — existing alone on the edge of a public simulation, and privacy mode.”

“ _ Is _ a difference,” Jazz insisted as he copied the Prime’s motions, sending his own hook flying in another direction. “It’s all about interface.” Again Jazz couldn’t help but think of spider webs, the connections between mechs, only this time one strand was waving loose in the wind and he couldn’t hold it by himself. “I think he’s starting not to trust other Autobots.”

“Prowl has always been a private person.”

Jazz couldn’t even argue with that. Just because the mech prefered public sims didn’t mean he’d been forthcoming about what he got out of watching everyone else dream their dreams… but not participating in them. “Sure. But privacy mode,  _ privacy mode, _ Prime… It just ain’t like him.”

Prime sighed. “Even if it is not, there is nothing we can do if he decides to engage privacy mode. He has a right to his dreams. He’ll come out when he’s ready.”

“Yeah? And who’s going to sim with him?” Obviously Jazz wasn’t going to get any help from Prime. He reeled his line back in and set the fishing pole down, stripping off his violently bright Hawaiian shirt in the process. Then he took a two-step running leap off the boat to cannonball into the water. It may have  _ looked _ pretty blocky, but it sure  _ felt _ real, wonderful and cooling against his skin. Wheeljack didn’t skimp on the important things.

Overload from Other-Jazz slammed all three avatars back into his body before he broke through the surface for a breath.

.

.

[Hello (Jazz).]  
[(Prowl) is currently engaged in a private simulation. Privacy mode has been engaged.]  
[(Prowl) has selectively disengaged privacy settings to allow (Jazz) to participate.]  
[There is room for (1) more user to join this simulation.]  
[Would you like to join this simulation? Y/N?]

Jazz snarled half-heartedly at the text. At least Prowl was still letting him in. 

Flea-Jazz was already freezing cold and watching Starscream dig through an unending ice-field for a virtual version of Skyfire who had never been rescued. A dream the mech repeated every night, where instead of coming back to Cybertron, he’d kept searching; sometimes he found Skyfire, other times he… didn’t, and Jazz hated how watching him do it night after night pulled on his spark-strings. He should not be sympathizing with  _ Starscream _ of all mechs! New-Jazz was already in Blaster’s sim, the two of them playing Guitar Hero as a pair of human teenagers with more enthusiasm than sense.

New-Jazz had already gone through his nightly ritual of trying to get someone to acknowledge there was something wrong with Prowl. But there was nothing  _ Blaster _ could do to bypass privacy mode, even if he’d been inclined to. Which he wasn’t.

That left Other-Jazz. The one who went to Prowl every night and reported on Decepticon dreams and gossip, helped plot out the intricate web of mistrust and obsession that ruled Decepticon interactions, plotted out the attack he and Prowl would eventually launch, and tried to keep his friend sane.

He’d already hacked his protocols to treat overload like pain. He’d feel it with his avatars, but he did not want a repeat of that first time, all three of his duplicates slammed back into his body by it. He couldn’t be pulled from his mission watching the Decepticons. He  _ really _ couldn’t afford for his avatars to randomly disappear from his fellow Autobots’ sims. Once, upon hitting the water with his human skin — an experience every mech found overwhelming — could be laughed off, but if he slammed back into his body from mysterious overloads too often, people would start asking questions.

Not once did he consider  _ not _ interfacing with his VR partners. It was fun. Jazz had a lot of partners and, lately, not as much fun as he should have. There were nights when sparkly markers or whatever other fun things Jazz could come up with (VR sex with Wheeljack was extremely helpful there… sensation for SCIENCE!) was all that distracted Prowl from his slow spiral into Decepticon-like obsession. 

He clicked “Y”.

.

.

[Hello (Jazz).]  
[(Prowl) is currently engaged in a private simulation. Privacy mode has been engaged.]  
[(Prowl) has selectively disengaged privacy settings to allow (Jazz) to participate.]  
[There is room for (1) more user to join this simulation.]  
[Would you like to join this simulation? Y/N?]

.

.

“Come on, Ratchet!” Vinyl Scratch whined from the stool where patterns and cloths whirled around her. Powder-blue magic held a cloth up to her coat, and then a ribbon was held in place while a needle and thread stitched one to the other. She stamped her hoof in frustration. “You got medical overrides. I’m telling you — Prowl needs to be in a sim with someone who ain’t me for once.”

“Stop moving!” Rarity scolded. “And I thought Vinyl Scratch didn’t  _ talk. _ ”

“I’m making an exception just for you. Don’t you feel special, Ratch?”

“Exceedingly.”

“So?”

“So,  _ what? _ ”

“Come on! Keep up! Prowl! Medical overrides! VR with someone who isn’t me! It ain’t  _ healthy, _ Ratch. Ain’t it your job to keep us all  _ healthy?” _

“Jazz… there has never been any hard evidence that time voluntarily spent in privacy mode had any negative impacts on mental health. Now  _ stop moving. _ I want this dress to be  _ fabulous. _ ”

Vinyl Scratch just snorted irritably.  _ I’m  _ **_looking_ ** _ at your evidence right now, Ratch, _ she wanted to say, but couldn’t.

Because meanwhile, Jazz-the-mouse was slowly, carefully, gnawing little mouse-holes through the code-walls that kept the Decepticons (and Jazz) out of each other’s dreams. He wasn’t bringing those walls down, but Jazz-the-mouse needed to be able to move around a bit more… freely. 

Tonight, he wasn’t  _ trying _ to spy. But mice had exceptional hearing, and Jazz couldn’t block out the sounds of Hook carving out all his frustrations on AI-controlled versions of anyone who’d ever annoyed him… which was  _ everyone. _

.

.

[Hello (Jazz).]  
[(Prowl) is currently engaged in a private simulation. Privacy mode has been engaged.]  
[(Prowl) has selectively disengaged privacy settings to allow (Jazz) to participate.]  
[There is room for (1) more user to join this simulation.]  
[Would you like to join this simulation? Y/N?]

This was it, the last night. The calm before the storm.

To most of the Autobots Jazz had engaged privacy mode himself for the night, but in reality Jazz-the-mouse and Jazz-the-hamster were far from friendly territory, gnawing their ways into the last untouched corners of the Decepticon VR system. Teletraan helped. But it needed both of them to get it all done on time without moving quickly and carelessly and getting themselves caught. It was a miracle from Primus that Soundwave hadn’t caught any of Jazz’s rodent avatars already, and he didn’t want to push his luck trying to do with just one avatar what should be done with two. 

He’d send more, but he still couldn’t maintain more than three avatars at a time without firewall partitions. Suggesting he reestablish doublethink firewalls to Prowl three days ago had been the only time the Praxan had gotten violent — not at  _ Jazz, _ but he’d thrown his desk against the wall and wrecked the disks containing all his carefully laid plans, and torn the web of string and mech-sized post-it notes that they’d spent months building, and  _ forbid _ Jazz from doing any such thing. They’d manage with just three of him. 

Jazz had been miffed that Prowl thought he had any right to tell Jazz what he could and could not do, but that insistence Jazz not harm himself to do this had been the only thing stronger than his obsession with plots and plans. In the end Jazz had acquiesced. Three was enough.

Tonight he couldn't really call himself the  _ original _ Jazz, since it had been hamster-Jazz who had been the first avatar to manifest… so  _ Mech-Jazz _ clicked “Y” to enter Prowl’s dream. He already had his art kit, which had expanded exponentially in the months since Lucrezia had sworn to serve. It had  _ been _ months since Prowl had engaged any sim but his office. 

Jazz would let Prowl go over the plan one last time, then he was going to make sure his friend couldn’t think anything for the rest of the night. It wasn’t much, it wasn’t enough, but it was all he could do right now.

[Setting appropriate avatars are required for this simulation.]  
[Avatar requirements, as set by (Prowl) are as follows:]  
[Housecat.]

Surprise - relief - elation swamped him in equal measures; Jazz nearly broke down and sobbed. It wasn’t Prowl’s office. It wasn’t a tactical sim. Prowl was playing cats…  _ playing _ for the first time in far too long.

He set down the art kit and chose Nettlestep.

He materialized next to Milkfrost on a windowsill, looking out over a busy street. The Warrior Cats had been captured by humans!

“Big, horrible two-leggers!” Nettlestep meowed, falling into character with an ease he’d never had before Prowl had shown him how to create character personas, and run them concurrently with his own mind and emotions.

Milkfrost leaned over and licked his fellow Warrior’s ears clean. “Hello, Jazz. Are we ready?”

Even escaping from the horrible two-legger place couldn’t distract Prowl from his own private war. Alright. He’d give Prowl a few minutes, but then there was a sparkly ball with their names on it and he was  _ not _ going to let Prowl pass it up. “As ready as we’ll ever be. T minus twenty-three hours. Chewing the last holes into all the dreamscapes now.”

“Good,” Prowl purred. He settled into the cat-bed the actually-nice humans had left there for them, tucking his nose under his tail. “I’ll be glad to finally reach the end.”

“Do this right, it ain’t actually the end,” Jazz pointed out. 

“I know, but it is an end _ game. _ One that is much better played out by Prime. No more battles.”

“And what happens to you?” Nettlestep’s fur stood on end. He did not like this talk. Prowl sounded  _ defeated _ in a way he had not since this had begun. Not since the fall of Praxus. “No battles… no war… what happens to Prowl now?” Because Prowl was  _ obsessed. _ Was it even possible for him to leave it all behind at this point?

Milkfrost huffed. “I know what I have become. I said that my secret motive card was that I would not become a monster to do this, but… it seems motives change. And when the game ends, the Monster Manual is closed, and all the monsters just… go away, don’t they.”

_ No. _ “You ain’t a monster, Prowl.”

“Aren’t I?” In the Milkfrost avatar, that should have been accompanied by a snarl, but it was only said with another sigh. “This is how it must have started with the Decepticons… just one, or maybe a few, who withdrew. And then, their mistrust poisoned the others, until there was no trust or sanity or  _ dreams _ left for all the nightmares. As soon as we realized what had happened to them, I realized what was happening to myself.”

“So we’ll get you playing some games with the others,” Jazz meowed softly, “This ain’t the point of no return.”

“I tried. When I realized, I tried. But every one I pinged was either with someone else or locked in privacy mode. No one who said they were free for the night, was actually free. After a few nights, I stopped trying.”

_ Oh frag! The schedule! _ To the other Autobots the schedule was like the Pirate’s Code — more like guidelines than rules. It was built and rebuilt by gossip during the day, and the resulting gaps shuffled around come nightfall, until every mech who wanted one had a partner for the night. But Prowl didn’t gossip. He’d been depending on the schedule, and when it didn’t work…

“That’s when I started using privacy mode every night,” Prowl confirmed, as though reading Jazz’s thoughts. “So… secret motive card: still working for an end of the war?”

Jazz licked Prowl’s ears, licked his face and really wished cats could cry tears of sorrow. Because his spark was breaking and so was Prowl’s. Sharing the taste of salt-tears may not have changed that, but it would have told Prowl just how much he cared. This was  _ so much worse _ than he’d thought. He’d thought he’d have  _ time _ —

There were a million things he wanted to say, but he just didn’t have the words. “Yeah, Prowl,” was what he finally settled on. “You and me, we still got duplicate cards.”

Milkfrost scooched over in the bed. It didn’t make very much room, but they were  _ cats _ ; they didn’t need very much room. “Lay with me then. One final happy memory for a monster?”

.

.

It was the first night in months were Jazz wasn’t faced with Prowl’s selection screen. Instead all three of him were in a place that only existed once-upon-a-dream, overlooking a forest of thorns.

“Ready, Teletraan?”

[I am ready, Jazz. I look forward to having dreamers again.]

“Then let’s get this show on the road.”

Diaval raised his human-hand and triggered the command:  _ Virus Upload Begin. _


	3. Chapter 3

In a small, out of the way piece of the  _ Nemesis’ _ VR, behind privacy mode and masked as just another Decepticon dream, ravens flew above sharp towers that reached for a thunderous sky. The castle was dark and foreboding. It had been built of sharp angles and darkness, modeled off a cartoon castle older than their waking time on Earth. Around it grew thorns of iron, a (fire)wall as literal as it was virtual, to keep out anyone who might discover their staging ground. 

Thorns continued to grow, snaking out through mouse-holes painstakingly chewed through code over the course of many, many nights. The virus taking root and spreading, reaching deep into the foundations of the Decepticons’ VR systems.

Above, one of the ravens wheeled, cawing to its fellows. And it was to a cacophony of answering raven-calls that he dove down, down, down through the nearest mousehole, and Diaval cast aside this form for another.

.

.

“How  _ did _ that spell go again?” With a surprised squawk, Laserbeak turned to face the unexpected  _ nightmare _ voice. Instinctively, she shot her wing-cannons and Jazz flickered, fizzed and pixelated as his avatar was banished from her dreamscape. 

_ “That’s _ right,” Jazz said from behind her, and there he was again; this time she dove, aiming to escape through a pin-hole sized opening in the fractal puzzle that was her training sim.  _ “FORCECAGE!” _

Laserbeak ran smack into a wall. 

Jazz sauntered up while she turned and cried and tried to find an exit. Useless! A solid cube of slightly blue glass surrounded her on all sides. He grinned as he leaned on the near-invisible wall now dividing them, tapping an intricately carved stick against it, throwing sparks into the air like a fountain firework. “You ever play Dungeons and Dragons, Laserbeak? Fun game.  _ Ton _ of spells, for everything from fetching firewood to summoning tidal waves. This one,” he tapped the side of the solid cube with that wand again, throwing more sparks, “creates an immobile, almost invisible prison of solid force. No way in. No way out. Several ways to dispel it, of course. Checks and balances, the core of every fun game, but here and now… you’re not exactly a wizard, are you? And this ain’t exactly a game anymore.”

The cassette made a high, ear-splitting shriek of alarm.  _ Soundwave sees you! Soundwave will come! _

The nightmare, Jazz, just smiled like a shark. “I’m sure he will. In the meantime, you’re not flying anywhere.”

.

.

_ Into a wolf. _

Diaval ran across a glacier. A snowstorm raged around him, leaving icicles on his fur. Ice cut into the pads of his feet. Wind howled with all the voices of the damned… and amid the chorus, one voice howled louder than the others. Starscream’s.

Wolf-ears flattened against his skull. That sound  _ hurt _ and not just because of the seeker’s distinctive screech. Tonight, Skyfire had frozen to death before he was found. 

The storm intensified, and the seeker never noticed he had company in his dream, or the code-tracks and snow-dust Diaval left in the snow behind him. And when there were enough tracks buried under the falling snow, Diaval left, crawling into the mouse-hole between dreamscapes and taking another, more appropriate shape.

.

.

Jazz sat on the forcecage box, with one leg crossed over the other, absently juggling a glass ball-of-fire. It danced over his fingers as he waited. Ravage stalked out of a nearby fractal and Jazz grinned at him. 

“Ah-ah!” he admonished as he presented the ball for his perusal. “Don’t be so hasty. Recognize this?” The fire dimmed for a moment to reveal malicious code, coiled and trapped and not even bothering with a metaphor. Just code, inside a tiny, spherical firewall.

The same code that had devastated the Autobots.

“Wouldn’t want to break it, would we, pretty kitty?” He withdrew his hand and the firewall was opaque again, but still oh-so-fragile. It wouldn’t take more than a bump to break, and Jazz balanced it precariously on the back of his hand. 

It rolled this way and that,  _ almost _ falling before Jazz tilted his hand to compensate and kept it on his hand.

Ravage had chosen an avatar-version of himself who could speak. “You think that scares us? We had antivirus software for that since before we’d finished programming it.”

Jazz grinned. “You think I don’t know that? I know how nasty little viruses like this work as well as you do. This ain’t exactly what you left behind in our systems anymore. Took a while to tweak it, but… worth it, don’t you think?” The ball rolled over his fingers and he flipped his hand. Laserbeak and Ravage both flinched, before Jazz caught the ball in his palm. “This one, it don’t need me to shoot you to go off. Any death will do. It’ll just proliferate through your systems until it’s infected all the Decepticons, then will sit and wait for something else to kill you. It’s a smart virus, so it’ll take some time, vorns even, to root it out of every code-corner it will find… and in the meantime, every time,  _ every _ time one of you dies, BAM! Overload. Cascading overloads even!”

The mech did a breakdance-step on top of the forcecage that still held Laserbeak, spun, and ended up facing Frenzy (or was it Rumble?), trying to sneak up behind him. “And not the  _ nice _ sort of overload, isn’t that right?”

Turning his back on Ravage was a mistake. 

The cat hit him in the back, sinking claws into armor with a violent  _ screeech! _ Jazz pitched forward under his weight and the ball went flying, only to be caught by Frenzy. The Autobot avatar pixelated and disappeared.

“That’s okay,” Jazz said, from his spot leaning against the pillar of a nearby fractal, balancing a ball-of-fire between two fingers. “I have as many copies as I need.”

.

.

_ Into a dragonfly. _

Diaval flew on insect’s wings, infectious code trailing behind him as fairydust. He buzzed through the virtual corridors of the  _ Nemesis _ looking for his prey.

Somewhere in here, Skywarp was setting up his next, perfect, prank.

Finally keen compound eyes spotted the purple seeker. Tonight it was the old bucket-over-the-door trick. With a bucket full of electric eels.

Over the door to Megatron’s quarters.

That was Skywarp’s dream: setting up prank after prank, each trying to outdo the last in his quest for the ultimate joke. Granted, Skywarp’s sense of humor was more than a tad on the malicious side, but Diaval liked his dreams better than those of some of his other comrades. They had an element of creative challenge many of the others’ lacked.

It was sad in an isolated dream, where no one could appreciate the prankster’s brilliance.

The seeker still hadn’t noticed Diaval, and he had spread his code to this corner of the VR sim. It was time to move on. He flew to the mouse-hole and abandoned this form for another.

.

.

“How the FRAG are you doing that!” Rumble yelled, joining his twin.

Jazz grinned. “What? You don’t think it’s  _ fair? _ ” He tossed the ball-of-fire up and down, catching it lightly. All the symbiotes seemed frozen, entranced. They hardly dared  _ move _ lest they cause Jazz to drop his deadly little virus. Right now, the Autobot seemed to want to  _ play.  _ Loathe as they were to play along, until they could get the virus away from him… “Well, don’t blame this one on me. This one is entirely  _ her _ fault.” He pointed to the still-trapped Laserbeak.

“It seems,” Jazz said from the other side of the forcecage, stepping out of another fractal, “that having multiple identical avatars appear in the same simulation has…  _ consequences.” _

Frenzy gave a little shriek of surprise. Ravage hissed, suddenly unsure which direction he should be snarling.

Jazz and Jazz just grinned, each juggling a ball-of-fire in one hand. “Can’t get rid of me — you don’t even know which one’s real.” One said.

“Maybe neither,” said the other. “Yeah.  _ Probably _ neither.”

“You don’t know where I am.”

“ _ What _ I am.”

“Could be anything, anywhere… but these,” together the two Jazzes brandished their balls-of-fire, the firewalls once again thinning to the point of showing off the malicious code inside. “Are more than real enough.”

“And I’m tired of playing games with the children.”

“Where’s Soundwave?”

“He better show himself soon.”

“Or I’ll show you four what  _ other _ nasty tricks I’ve learned since you burned down my world.”

.

.

_ Into a glitchmouse. _

Diaval could have chosen to be an  _ elephant _ and Megatron wouldn’t have noticed him tramping through his dream. The glitchmouse scurried out of the way of the heavy feet as the warlord grappled with the Prime in the ruined gladiatorial arena of Kaon. With a shout, he brought his energy-mace down on the Prime’s head, and the NPC pixelated and disappeared.

Only for an energy-axe to knock to send him stumbling forward. Megatron snarled and turned to face his new opponent, who was, surprise, surprise, Optimus Prime.

The two faction leaders collided, kicking and gouging in the spilled energon that slicked across the arena floor. Diaval scurried away. He left behind tracks and pixie dust and new programming directives, just waiting to be triggered.

Finished here, Diaval cast aside this form for another.

.

.

“Jazz: will state purpose here.”

One Jazz sauntered toward the cassette carrier, a cheerful bounce in his step, while the other paced the perimeter of the brightly colored “clearing” like a caged tiger. “Really? Just like that? You issue a  _ command _ and expect me to follow?”

“Do you even know what sort of trouble you caused us?” Other-Jazz snarled. “Did you care?”

Soundwave stood his ground. “Soundwave: did care. Soundwave: had no choice. Mercy.”

“Liar!”

“Liar!” — “Liar!” — “Liar!” — Jazz’s voice echoed from around them, building a crescendo from every corner of Laserbeak’s dreamscape.

Already on-edge from the mental strain of dealing with two vicious, mocking saboteurs, the cassettes huddled closer together.

“Nice trick, huh?” said Jazz.

“Magic Mouth’s another great spell. So versatile, for something that’s just essentially a short recording, isn’t it?” said Other-Jazz. “Or maybe it wasn’t a spell; maybe it was all the mes out there waiting to step out of the shadows.”

“Jazz: will state purpose here.”

“Mech…” Both Jazzes brandished their balls-of-fire, balanced on the backs of hands. With identical flourishes, they juggled the balls over to their palms, and with a twist of sleight-of-hand, each now held three spheres, each a slightly different color and containing a slightly different virus. Six different malicious codes. Soundwave was a good programmer — the best! — but it appeared Jazz was planning to overwhelm him with the sheer number of viruses he was ready to release. “Right now, I’m just here to make your life miserable. Do you remember my  _ begging _ for you to reconsider, to not do this, to leave our race the last bastion of peace we all had? You ignored me then. You  _ hacked _ me. You thought you could control what I did in response to your attack, but  _ you can’t. _ ”

“But maybe,” a third Jazz said, stepping out from a gap between two fractals, three spheres glittering in his hand, “I’ll reconsider for the pleasure of hearing  _ you _ beg.”

“Come on, Soundwave! How much do  _ you _ value your peaceful dreams?”

.

.

_ Into a raven. _

Diaval had one last dream to visit. Or rather, for a duplicate to visit.

This one was only a dark, starless void. Its dreamer was elsewhere for the moment, leaving the dreamscape vulnerable. Security was tight, but Diaval had the keys. No mouseholes here. No secret invasion routes. Here he had permission to fly, if not permission to alter.

With no one to see him, Diaval favored speed over stealth, flying to every corner of an endless void and leaving behind feathers that floated down, caught by gravity that did not truly exist.

In truth, he could have chosen any form for this dreamscape. Couldn’t change avatars — he had to remain  _ Diaval, _ but that still left a near infinite number of possibilities. Diaval, as he’d been programmed for his use here, was a true shapeshifter. There was no one here to see him, but he’d taken on his original, raven form. It was the shape he had begun the night in, and it was the form he’d end it in. Diaval was a shapeshifter, but in his story the raven had been his first, original form until he had agreed to serve Maleficent as spy and messenger, servant and warrior. Service begets change… an echo of a knotted bondcord that had started him on this path.

The mind inside Diaval’s avatars had other reasons. Other symbols. Other metaphors. Omen of death and war. Protectors of a nation. The messengers of Odin, Hugin, and Munin, thought and mind, who each daybreak were sent out into the world to observe what was happening and question everyone, even the dead. By the time the sun finished rising, they would come back to whisper their master what they had seen and learned. Raven, the North American creator of the world. Light-stealer. Rascal. Teacher. 

War-omen. Sage. Trickster. Villain. Hero. 

Shapeshifter.

Diaval was finding the form of a raven to be exceptionally fitting for this task.

He took special care with this dreamscape, spreading the feathers, and the code they were a metaphor for, far and wide though there was no distance, no space in which to fly in the emptiness before the creation of a world. Soon Raven would create one, recreate one, here and elsewhere, and Diaval would have to live with the consequences.

And then to leave this dreamscape, this deactivated VR simulation, he needed no other shape. Still liking this one, he kept it as he flew to his next task.

.

.

_ Into a mech. _

The raven cawed as it flew through Laserbeak’s dreamscape, and Jazz smiled, breaking the stand-off between him and Soundwave. It wasn’t a mean or malicious smile. It wasn’t mocking or vicious.

It was a smile of simple, honest pleasure. “Too late, Soundwave,” three identical voices purred in perfect harmony. All three took a step back, ceding the stage to the raven.

The glossy black bird cawed again as it landed on Laserbeak’s cage. It flapped its wings dramatically, then it, and everything else, changed.

The simulation began to shake as thorns burst through the code walls and shredded the divisions between the private dreamscapes. A forest of broken dreams and thorns, and in the distance rose Sleeping Beauty’s castle, a dark shadow, perched on a dark crag, ominous and foreboding. Ravens, war omens, flew over the dark spires, and through thunderclouds bursting with sickly green lightning.

The virus left only bewildered mechs. Jazz and Jazz and Jazz and Jazz and Jazz and Jazz and Jazz and Jazz and Jazz and Jazz and Jazz, now with no place left to hide in Laserbeak’s broken fractal puzzle, held their virus-spheres up high, each of which glowed like stars and zipped away from his hands like fireflies, finding their marks like hunter-seeker missiles. But instead of the virus he’d promised, when shattered, the firewalled code revealed itself to be a new avatar for each Decepticon it hit. A pony, each crafted specifically for the Decepticon it changed. No cutie marks. Every single one of them was a blank flank.

“Hey, pretty bird,” Jazz said gently, perched on Laserbeak’s forcecage. Slightly different than the others, this Jazz had a heart where his Autobot symbol should have been. He met Laserbeak’s optics, held the gaze of a trembling, frightened cassette with his glowing visor. In one hand, he held out to her a tiny golden sphere. Inside, instead of an illusory virus, danced a white and rainbow alicorn, with a blazing gold cutie mark on her flank. Trails of glittering sparkles floated in the new avatar’s wake, filling the tiny, confined space. “I think this place needs a decent sunrise, don’t you?”

_ What—?! _

“Come on, pretty bird,” Jazz crooned. “You’ll understand once the sun rises, I promise.” He jumped down from the forcecage and it disappeared. Laserbeak fired up her engines, tried to move, tried to dodge, but the golden sphere had been programmed specifically with her in mind, and she was not fast enough to evade it as it darted on golden snitch-wings from Jazz’s hand to her. Princess Celestia gave a very undignified horse-like whinny of surprise and indignation. “You’ll understand, but I can’t do it for you, pretty bird. You have to bring up the sun yourself.”

With a baleful stare, Princess Celestia turned to the east. To bring up the sun, she only had to will it. The knowledge was there, programmed as one of the avatar’s instincts. Should she? Jazz was the enemy. Jazz was her own personal nightmare, for all that this one seemed gentler than the Jazzes who’d tormented her a moment ago. This one was less… theatrical. Still she shouldn’t even be considering this… 

_ I want to play. _

Light gathered at the tip of her horn. The sun was heavy. She strained against its weight. It resisted being brought up from its resting spot. Celestia’s head bowed, sweat gathered along her neck, until…

With a toss of her head, a flap of her wings, the sun breached the horizon, flooding the broken dreamscape with light. The shattered remnants of obsessive dreams and the forest of dark thorns that had torn apart the walls between them all faded,  _ melted _ under the sun’s light. Instead of the dark castle, defended by Maleficent-the-dragon of Sleeping Beauty’s nightmare, the castle of Canterlot rose over a dreamscape flooded with bright color.

Celestia looked around at the new, cartoon VR realm. Around her, pony-Decepticons who had not dreamed with another person in millions of years slowly shook off their disorientation, wondered what the  _ frag _ had just happened, and were already starting to argue with each other. Jazz (all of him) was nowhere to be seen.

[Welcome, dreamers, to Equestria,] said Teletraan.


	4. Epilogue

Prowl was glad he’d always before been a mech of few words. Silence, it seemed, was the only thing that got him through the day any longer. He jumped at shadows. Had to keep himself from snarling at his fellow Autobots. Or at the very least assigning them scut-work shifts that would last, literally, forever. Their gazes itched over his plating. He locked himself in his office with his paperwork to get away from them. He couldn’t let them _see._ He couldn’t let them _know._

Know what? There logic failed him. Everything! Nothing! That fallacy was the only reason he still had any claim on sanity. Well that, and Jazz.

His quarters had acquired a dozen new locks and a constant, ever-changing web of traps he set each night before he could sleep, but when he finally lay down on his berth, the promise of a VR sim — and Jazz! — was enough to lure him into recharge.

The night after his and Jazz’s attack on the Decepticon VR, he resisted the urge to immediately load up his office. The plan was _done._ It was _through._ He’d done his part, pretending to be Jazz and distracting Soundwave’s team, while the true Jazz did what he needed to do to install Teletraan on the _Nemesis_ and disable privacy mode for all the Decepticons. Now it was up to the Decepticons, and eventually up to Prime. With any luck, Prowl could crawl away, and the others would never have to be faced with what had happened to him. He wasn’t going to let the poison spread. He wasn’t that selfish. Yet. And he hoped he could be gone before he was.

So he loaded up, intending to wait until one of Jazz’s avatars joined him. He’d let Jazz choose this time. He didn’t need his office.

He _didn’t_ need his office.

_He didn’t._

_He_ **_didn’t._ **

_He could bring up his office file then let Jazz change it when he got there…_ **_No!_ ** _That was the Decepticon-like obsession talking..._

“Jarvis,” he said, pacing around the blackness that was a VR realm with no sim yet loaded. “Where’s Jazz?” He should have been here by now. Please… he’d break _too_ _soon_ if Jazz abandoned him now.

Jarvis didn’t answer.

Immediately Prowl’s processor spun up, making lists of everyone who could have come in and interfered with his control AI. Wheeljack. Ratchet. Mirage was a decent hacker. Sunstreaker was good at programming VR systems. Prime… Prime could have ordered _anyone_ to interfere with him. Decepticons… Prowl had miscalculated. They weren’t still reeling and trapped from what he and Jazz had done… _Soundwave…_

He didn’t even notice that his list had skipped over the most obvious potential culprit. And why shouldn’t it have? He trusted Jazz.

He needed his office.

“Load ‘Chess Tournament in the Park’,” he ordered, forgetting for the moment that Jarvis was off —

[Apologies (Prowl), but that is currently an invalid request.]

THAT WASN’T JARVIS!

“Explain!” he snapped at the alien AI.

[I will be more than happy to fulfill all of (Prowl)’s requests in the future, but currently cannot.]  
[The simulation (Spotlight) must be run before any other request made by (Prowl) can be considered valid.]

Prowl paced in the nothingness. Agitation crawled through his circuits. To run the simulation or not to run it. Jarvis offline, a strange AI, a strange simulation… to risk it or not.

He was still debating, running the question through endless loops in his tactical computer, when a part of him, one of his avatar-skins, made a decision. That one still had a sliver of trust for his fellow Autobots. It pointed out that the AI’s syntax was that of the new, primitive Autobot AIs. This was an ally AI. Supposedly. Separate thought-string that avatar may have been, but it wasn’t firewalled from the rest of Prowl. Once it arrived at a decision — risk the strange AI — the rest of Prowl followed that avatar out of the stalemate the rest of his processor had become.

“Run simulation ‘Spotlight,’ then.”

The feeling of going from a simulation containing nothing to one containing something was familiar. And ‘Spotlight’ was a very simple sim.

It had been made using Wheeljack’s Environment Builder. That should have put his mind at ease, but instead Prowl only became more distressed. He couldn’t _trust_ —

It was a simple environment. Blocky, Minecraft-esque grass spread out from his feet and a backdrop of Earth’s sky spread out above him, moon shining bright. The only other thing the sim contained was a tree stump with a… spotlight shining down on it from the night.

Processor still spinning with possibilities — none of them good — he approached the highlighted platform. On it was a single object. A letter.

Prowl’s processor stalled. He couldn’t process it. _He trusted Jazz!_

This was…! Prowl paced. Alright. This may not be _his_ VR, but it was still a friendly one. _Jazz was his friend. He trusted Jazz._ No tricks or traps or firewalls to hack past. He could open a screen, or book or anything he could write on and start counter-hacking. He’d get privacy mode back. It’d only take some time. A week, maybe two, if he had enough time per night to work on it.

Knowing Jazz, that had been the point. The mech knew Prowl was a deft hand at VR hacking, even if he didn’t have the skill to face off against a truly skilled hacker in that arena. His job had been to _distract_ Soundwave, not actually engage in a code-battle with him. But this was okay. This was fine. He had the time, no one wanted to sim with him; he’d proven it earlier with that damned schedule when everyone was “busy” when Prowl was the one to ping them. He just needed to get started. He needed a pen and paper. Or a datapad. He needed his offic—

“Hey Jaz— Prowl?” Prowl whirled to face the unexpected voice. Bumblebee stood there. He took in the view of the agitated tactician, and suddenly didn’t even care that Jazz wasn’t where he’d said he’d be. There was something obviously off with Prowl. “What’s wrong?”

 _Try to be nice,_ Jazz had said. Prowl wasn’t sure he could, but for the only friend he had left, he could _try._

“Hi,” it was as pathetic an evasion as it sounded, if Bumblebee’s increasingly worried expression was anything to go by. He should go to his office… “This isn’t where I wanted to spend the night. Do you have a housecat avatar?” No one wanted to play cats with —

“Sure,” Bumblebee’s answer was clearly that of someone who was allowing his question to be put off, and wouldn’t allow it forever, but Prowl could deal with that _later—_ “This a Warrior Cats sim, or just regular house cats? I’ve got both.”

.

.

.

End

**Author's Note:**

> [The Voice](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ns_KwvoObzY), written by Brendan Graham and performed in English by Eimear Quinn.


End file.
